Microsoft’s Cortana Personal Assistant is now a real Hologram

In Build 2017 event, Microsoft has announced the Cortana artificial intelligence assistant has more than 145 million users, representing about a third of the 500 million users that have upgraded to Windows 10.

The Florida-based developer has created a holographic Cortana avatar to go along with its regular voice. He wanted to build a physical piece of kit that shows what a future Cortana-based home appliance would look like. His idea was using the holographic AI sidekick from the Halo video game franchise.

The impressive display was built by a Halo fan named Jarem Archer. The result is an AI assistant capable of responding to user queries, swiping and sliding tiny versions of different applications with her holographic body.

Holographic is just the friendlier term but the original name of device called the “Pepper’s Ghost”, which utilizes mirrors to project the appearance of a 3D object especially in Cortana.

Cortana presents and animates a Unity 3D application for her holographic form using three different camera angles. A secondary application parses data sent both to and from the official Cortana service, rendering the results back into a format that the Unity 3D app can understand, allowing her to present this information to the user.

Jarem said: “the project is still pretty much a work in progress and he can extend her functionality by building more UWP apps.” This means Cortana can move beyond basic user queries about the weather, and will eventually be able to control everything like connected household appliances.

He also said that I’m not entirely sure on this specific project’s commercial ability, I intend on producing a very interesting product in the near future.